Kone Foundation is funding (€339 800) our project "Wealth inequality, well-being and public policy" for the years 2024-2027. I am the principal investigator, but, more importantly, the team includes various talented researchers from the FIT network. On this site, I will provide updates on the project's progress.
During year 2026, together with the FIRI-FIRE consortium, we have continued working with Statistics Finland to collect wealth information starting from year 1987. Our "researcher on loan" Miko Hallikainen have collected and validated data from inheritance and gift tax records as well as pre 2005 wealth tax records. Also, we have collected and analyzed information on the capital income for years that are currently missing in any of the ready made datasets. Building on the data infrastructure, our distributional national accounts work with Toni Juuti, Ohto Kanninen and Veini Luoma was presented at several conferences over the summer.
In the end of 2025, we have finally got all the data permissions to compile the the comprehensive measure of wealth in the Finnish context. We have two of our own researcher working at Statistics Finland especially to clean the raw data so that it can be transferred to our remote access server for research purposes.
In Summer 2025, researchers attended various international conferences and workshops. It has been nice to noticed that our efforts are considered important both for academy and policy. Especially, the valuation of assets has attained a lot of discussion. Countries with wealth tax, who get some values for their assets from their registers, also need to consider how well the taxable wealth reflects market wealth.
In January 2025, we organized a two-day workshop on Wealth Inequality, Wealth Accumulation and Public Policy at Tampere University. Daniel Waldenström from IFN, Sweden, delived a plenary lecture in the workshop and we had 10 presentations of on-going wealth related studies. Program can be found here: https://verotutkimus.fi/en/wealth-workshop-tampere/ .
In October 2024, FIT began a new collaboration with Statistics Finland to support our wealth project. Our researcher, Risto Hurmeranta, will work part-time in Statistics Finland with access to various housing registers. We hope this partnership accelerates progress toward a more complete picture of housing wealth in Finland over time.
In summer 2024, Tuuli Paukkeri presented a draft of our paper (by Paukkeri & Ravaska) on firm ownership and underage children at the IIPF conference. In September, she also presented it at the VATT seminar.
In May 2024, we had an internal kick-off workshop, with colleagues from Sweden and Bank of Finland. Program of the day
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